A clock chimed 30 minutes past midnight; however, for two students in a dungeon-level classroom--a pallid, scrawny Slytherin boy and an athletic, Japanese Ravenclaw girl-- this fact seemed to escape notice. The girl pursed her lips in concentration as she worked over her cauldron. "Damn," she muttered.
The boy, who had been examining a chart hanging on a rear wall with a bored expression, stalked over to her with an exasperated air of annoyance. "Let's see it, what've you done wrong..." She tried futilely to block him from looking into the cauldron, but he forced a ladle into it and dipped out a disgusting-looking substance. His voice dripping with contempt, he drawled, "Beige, Vance. Beige. It's a smashing success—if you were brewing day-old porridge. How many times do I have to tell you that it's 3 stirs clockwise? You're supposed to be making a potion, not putty!" The glob in the ladle flopped back into the cauldron with a hollow, defeated splash.
"Well, I'm trying! First of all, the book says TWO, CLOCKWISE, secondly, I've told you time and again to call me Akiko, and thirdly, I get the theory; it's just the damned exceptions and bloody guesswork that get me," the girl retorted, with a considerable bit of rage in her voice as she viciously stabbed a line in the book with her fingertip.
Their eyes narrowed, and they scowled at one another for a few moments, with the air of two equally headstrong tigers about to engage in a fight, before he snapped, "Let me see that," and snatched the book from her. A strand of lank, oily hair fell across his long nose, and he flipped it out of the way irritably. Suddenly, his superior attitude seemed to deflate. "'M'sorry, Akiko. You were right. The book does say two," he muttered, almost inaudibly. Then he added, more vociferously as though determined to assert his correctness, "But three works better." He pulled out a quill and scribbled over the offending line, then shoved the book back at her. "You can thin that" he gestured disdainfully to the cauldron's contents "out with essence of rue. It'll be substandard quality, but that'll be nothing new."
"Whatever works," Akiko responded, reddening slightly. The room was awkwardly silent as she added the essence of rue, her lips pursed. After half a minute's stirring she asked, in an impish—but nonetheless accurate—mimicry of the boy's natural tone of voice, "Other than the distinct displeasure of tutoring an utter imbecile like me, how's life with you?"
"I'm alive, that's all I can say for it," he muttered, his sallow complexion taking on the faintest hue of pink. "It'd be much better if you could keep your mouth shut for more than two moments," he added sharply, almost involuntarily, before biting his tongue. If he could only learn to keep his snarky comments to himself for the same duration, perhaps his own life would be significantly easier.
Akiko grinned roguishly. "You know I love the sound of my own voice too much for that to be possible," she replied smoothly and evenly as she continued to stir the cauldron. Her eyes widened and she threw herself up on tip-toes in a graceful releve to take a better look, a stray lock of shiny black hair flipping into her face. "It's thinning! YES!" she cried in triumph, pumping a fist in the air.
"Keep putting in effort, Vance. Eventually you might aspire to the level of 'mediocre,'" he drawled in languid bemusement; cursing himself inwardly for his sharp tongue. After an eternal pause of building up courage, the boy added, "You flew well -- in the match yesterday, by the way."
The girl looked up from her work, clearly startled. "You... came to my Quidditch match? But... Slytherin wasn't..." If she'd wanted to finish her sentence, she couldn't have. With all the subtlety of a blitzkrieg attack, the boy had leaned over and snogged her on the lips. Her eyes snapped shut in surprise; her hands flew up, startled, and accidentally tipped over a glass flagon. What seemed like hours later, it rolled to the ground and shattered, and the boy, shocked, broke off the kiss, turned away from her, and studied the flagstones. The girl's eyes opened wide, and she blinked, owlishly. "What...was that?" she asked, when she'd regained her breath.
The words came tumbling rapidly from the boy's mouth. "I'm sorry. It'll never happen again, I promise; please, don't mention this again..." He turned and fled from the room into the corridors. When he felt he'd put a sufficient distance between himself and the girl, he leaned a shoulder against the wall, dully thudding the side of his head against the damp stones over and over. He was so stupid, such a colossal fool, just like his father had told him time and again...and Potter and Black and their friends would mock him incessantly for it once they found out, as they inevitably would. Merlin's beard, why Akiko Vance? She was about as hopelessly unattainable as Lily...
"Don't do that," a soft voice interrupted his thoughts. He could barely stand to glance at her.
"I don't need your pity, Vance," he snarled to the wall, hot-faced. "Look, I know I'm a git, alright, and that I've not got a chance. So just leave me alone and we'll forget..." He felt soft fingers gently touch his cheek and turn his head.
"Severus?" she interrupted him, with the mildest hint of exasperation as she leaned toward him, her dark almond eyes twinkling. "Shut it." She pressed her lips against his, forcing him to comply with her order. Something on the order of a minor explosion began rocketing about inside his midsection...
At half-past midnight, in his private study at Spinner's End, former Hogwarts Professor Severus Snape emerged from his Pensieve.
.Snape sat forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his desk, and forced the heels of his palms into his eyes as far as he could, kneading them with abrasive fervor as he lost himself in reflection. Why, after almost 18 years, were his mind and memories settling repeatedly on Akiko Vance? The silvery-white glow issuing from his desk poured into all the hollows of his face, making him look rather terrifying to the observer. He emerged from behind his hands and glared at the Pensieve apprehensively, harboring the briefest of suspicions that the etched stone bowl was conspiring to cause him grief. He'd pay for his moments of reverie with the Dark Lord the next day... after all his years of Occlumency, memories of his only happiness were the sole thing he was incapable of concealing.
She was dead; he knew that, he'd killed her himself, an action that had ripped his heart from his body and left him with a range of emotions encompassing only contempt, hatred, and rage. Yet, in the four years that he had loved her, he'd been the happiest that ever he had been in his lifetime. Daydreams of those days brought him the odd errant smile...once the school had found out that she was involved with him, there had been a renewed interest in jinxing him within an inch of his life, led by James Potter, who never stopped suspecting that he had slipped the girl a love potion. He didn't care. They could have hexed him from head to toe and it would all have been worth it.
"Well...as long as I'm going to catch it, might as well allow myself another," he thought to himself resignedly, and bent forward, his hooked nose descending closer and closer to the surface of the dancing, liquid-white light, until he somersaulted into another memory.
He and Akiko were wandering down a darkened corridor at Hogwarts, Kiko bounding and skipping ahead in her characteristic, exuberant way; he slinking along, warily. Judging by height, he had to have been a sixth year. His younger self whispered, "Muffliato" and slid his wand back into his bag. "We shouldn't have done this, Akiko..." he complained.
"Course we should've. Besides, Slughorn likes both you AND me, so we're fine," Akiko replied. "C'mon, you've gotta skive off at LEAST once before you graduate. And it's potions, so it's not like you need it. I've learned loads more from you than from Sluggy anyway..."
"Well aren't you just cherry blossoms and happiness today," he drawled, with a mordant shade in his voice. Snape reckoned to himself that he must have been about sixteen, just past the holidays when—he recalled with a cringe—his father had excoriated him daily for growing his hair into a ponytail.
"Ever so," Akiko responded distractedly, searching the corridor wall with her eyes for something.
His younger self shivered, and asked, "Where're we going, anyway?"
"We're alllllmost there, I can feel it," Akiko murmured, "Sirius told me it should be riiight about..."
The boy cringed a little. "Kiko, it makes me nervous when they're around you all the time. I don't like it."
"I know you don't, Sev, but if I did everything you told me to, I wouldn't be your girlfriend, would I?" the girl responded cheekily. "No. I'd be your house elf."
Outside the study at Spinner's End, Peter Pettigrew was sitting on the stairs, stewing in an intensely private fury. Snape had gotten the best of everything he'd ever wanted: better N.E.W.T. scores in all his subjects, better position in the Dark Lord's hierarchy, and, most nettlesome and unforgivable of all, the girl whose favor he'd coveted since the age of 13. Exotic where he was bland, outgoing where he was shy, skilled on the Quidditch pitch where he was hopeless, Akiko Irene Vance hadn't turned the heads of many at Hogwarts. Oftentimes outstripped in attractiveness and skill beside her fast friend, Lily Evans,Akiko was kindly, sunny in disposition, and generally well-liked, but not the sort of girl that boys tended to take to the Astronomy Tower.
The Marauders had adopted her as a sort of mascot before they ever arrived at Hogwarts; a lot of other first-year girls had occupied a big compartment together, but she and a pretty, red-haired girl had joined a forlorn-looking Remus Lupin in a compartment, a compartment which he'd been drawn toward joining and which was later crashed by a pair of show-offs, James Potter and Sirius Black. The merry, outgoing girl had prattled with both Lily and the boys incessantly. Well, not with them so much as at them at first, but eventually they grew to be fond of the "Japanese chatterbox," as Lupin had called her. When she alone, of the six of them in the compartment, was sorted into Ravenclaw instead of Gryffindor, she'd looked disappointed, but accepted it nonetheless and continued to remain a fast friend of theirs. James and Sirius came to regard her as a little sister, and when Pettigrew had, late one night in third year, admitted that he fancied her, Prongs, Padfoot, and Moony had made it their mission to see to it that no one else had a chance, by relentlessly sharing her company almost around the clock, a fact that worked to James's advantage in the long run.
No one else, that is, except Snivellus, Pettigrew recalled, his lips curling into a rueful sneer. They all knew the stringy, unattractive Slytherin really wanted to be with Lily, but if he couldn't have her, or if his Blood prejudices wouldn't permit him to, why not settle for her best friend, whose Blood status was completely unknown? Peter remembered how the girl used to bedevil Snape in the corridors by calling, "Hullo, Severus!" cheerily at the very top of her prodigious lungs every time she saw him, which never failed to cause him to cringe and turn a fiery crimson; he wryly recalled how Akiko would mutter, under her breath to whomever she was with at the time, about what a standoffish little git he was, asserting with a gleeful snicker, "He hates me."
But Snape got his revenge, during O.W.L. year, when he tutored Akiko in Potions and began slipping her Amortentia. Soon the pair of them were sickeningly inseparable; the day-bright Quidditch player and Prefect found the uninvolved boy's dark, taciturn , night-like silence to be the ideal audience for her animated prattling in the back of Potions classes. Pettigrew crushed a splinter in his metallic hand absently, reducing it to fine dust with suppressed anger at the recollections. Just as rapidly as the splinter had fallen victim to his silver fingers, the Marauders' loyalty to Akiko had outweighed their interest in making Snape's life a nightmare at every available chance. True enough, in Akiko's (and pursuantly, Lily's) absence, their rivalry escalated to all-out, full-scale war, but the moment that either of the girls showed up, wands disappeared and hasty excuses were made. Lupin had tried, for a brief stint, to head off Lily or Akiko whenever they approached such altercations, but the girls rapidly learned to sidestep him in the corridors. Eventually, Snape and Potter had realized it was in their mutual best interest to leave one another alone, and reluctantly reached an uneasy armistice. He remembered the day the truce had been reached:
Akiko and Lily had come sprinting up to the lakeside, Prefect badges bouncing awkwardly on their chests, in a whirlwind of black, bronze, blue, red, and gold. Their book-filled bags thudded to the ground as they discarded them, still running, and whisked out their wands.
"You tossers; you promised!" Akiko spat venomously at Sirius and Peter as she tore past the tree against which Sirius was leaning nonchalantly and under which Peter was watching, in his perpetual role as the cheering section, having only just hidden his wand behind his back.
"You know, Wormtail, if I didn't know better I'd say she was mildly peeved with us," Sirius drawled. "And I can't imagine why." Just then, Lupin came running up, and skidded to a halt, bending forward with his hands on his knees.
"I...I tried to head them off..." he panted to Sirius as Lily and Akiko leapt between Potter and Snape. "But I couldn't..."
"We'd had that bit out on our own," Sirius said dismissively, still watching the two black-haired boys trying to get around the girls standing between them, now hurling insults instead of hexes.
"Sod off, Evans! Would you two get out of the way?" James called in flippant irritation, without taking his eyes off Snape.
"If you don't STOP this... contemptible behavior, I'll—I'll have points from Gryffindor," Akiko threatened in a trembling tone of voice, her lower lip quivering.
"Crib that line from McGonagall, Kiko?" Severus asked her derisively as he nursed a prolifically bleeding cut on his right bicep.
Lily whipped around to look at the stringy boy, adding, "And I'LL have points from Slytherin."
"You wouldn't dare," Snape barked, scandalized. Lily crossed her arms and favored him with a truculent glower, her green eyes narrowing to slits. He raised an eyebrow, and admitted reluctantly, "All right, perhaps you would, then."
"You'd never let her have points from your own HOUSE, Evans," James Potter exclaimed indignantly.
"If it'd teach you a lesson about harassing each other senseless, I would double it," Lily retorted. James Potter cast one last glare at Snape, then finally lowered his wand. Severus did the same, and both boys stowed them in their bags, grumbling.
While Prongs benefited from this arrangement, however, Wormtail failed to see how that situation held any advantage for him. James got Lily, Snape got Akiko, and he got the occasional condescending pat on the head. He longed for the power to right this imbalance of justice, longed so much for it that he couldn't refuse Dolohov and Rosier's offer of power beyond his wildest dreams if he became an informant in the ranks of the Dark Lord. Peter snorted contemptuously. If lurking outside Severus Snape's library in this god-forsaken Muggle town was their idea of power beyond his wildest dreams, clearly someone's dreams were lacking in scope and imagination. And now, here was Snape, gloating over the memories of the woman that Peter knew should have been his. He was sickened.
Suddenly, there was a brighter flash: Snape had disappeared into the Pensieve again. Peter had been awaiting the chance to lock it back in the cupboard while Snape was still in it for quite a while. Telling the Dark Lord what one of his top—and most unreadable—advisors was doing would, perhaps, buy Pettigrew greater favor, or even—he grinned with delight at the prospect—bring down Snape. He pushed open the hidden door and crept out into the library, a hidden expression of glee on his face. His hands had just rested on the edges of the bowl when suddenly, a deafening bang echoed through the room, throwing the chubby, bald man to the ground. When he rolled over and looked up, he saw Severus Snape towering over him, a dangerous glower on his face. "I don't recall asking you into my study, Wormtail;" he snapped angrily, his wand raised.
"I-I-didn't...realize...I was... clearing up..."
"You may have languished in desuetude as a house pet for thirteen years, but don't assault my intelligence," Snape hissed silkily. "Even the thickest of wizards can tell when a Pensieve is occupied." A bright yellow spray of a curse flew at Pettigrew, and he scrambled up, barely dodging it, and bolted for the stairs, followed closely by a hail of curses that he knew Snape was merely permitting to miss him in order to propel him from the room. You'll regret not hitting me with a few of those, Snape, Pettigrew thought angrily.